Can an organization really cut development time more than 70 percent by embracing the agile philosophy and open architecture? The intelligence-gathering arm of the U.S. Air Force says it's done just that.

The Air Force's Distributed Common Ground System, a network of 27 surveillance and intelligence-gathering sites, projects that it will ultimately save hundreds of millions of dollars by moving to agile development, open architecture, and infrastructure-as-a-service, said Wes Haga, chief of mission applications and infrastructure programs at the Air Force Research Lab.